Our practice, then, must be quite simple – as simple as possible. All we have to do is sit down quietly and listen to our feelings. There is no practice more certain, more elevated or more human than this.

Little by little, as surface agitations die down, we touch our true feelings. Once we are aware of these deeper feelings, we are able to discern the feelings of others.

When you sit with your own feelings, I call it meditative communion. When you discern the feelings of others, I call it meditative listening.

Meditative listening may happen in many settings: in a listening partnership or a listening circle, at work or in everyday life.

When you meet, you divide the time equally. For half the time you are the listener. Then your companion listens to you.

When it is your turn to be listened to, the time is for you. You use it however you like. You say whatever you want. You may say a lot or very little or nothing at all. For some things are private. You will not say them now, perhaps not ever.

The listener is always discreet and treats the things you say as confidential.

The listener is careful not to run ahead of you and makes no attempt to penetrate your reserve.

The listener is always on your side and accepts you just as you are.

There is a natural cycle of meditative listening: feeling and conveying, following and receiving – and so back to feeling.

At first you may be silent, closing your eyes, slowly becoming aware of what you are feeling.

You say things as they come to you, conveying small clusters of meaning in words or images, sounds or gestures.

The listener takes in each cluster, sensitive to the wordless feeling behind it.

The listener says the cluster back to you, plainly and accurately, perhaps in your own words. This invites you to turn back to your wordless feeling, to ask inwardly: “Do I feel heard?”

When you feel heard a silence falls.
In that silence more may come.
Often it is something deeper: you can feel it
just now forming at the edge of being.

Sometimes what comes is the next piece of the story.
Sometimes it is a feeling for the whole story.
Sometimes it is like grace, like a breath from another world.

Empathy is like a riverbed, shaped and re-shaped by the stream of listening, and in which it flows.

Today we are surrounded by voices. Each voice has something to say about the emptiness, unease and uncertainty that fester in our hearts. Each voice urges upon us some road to happiness. Each voice calls us to some path, some answer.

The answers are not in any of this. They are not outside us. The answers lie within.

Yet it is hard to find them alone. Perhaps it can’t be done. And for this reason it may be helpful to find somebody who can offer you spiritual accompaniment.

What do I mean by the word “spiritual”? People use this word in many ways. I mean something like this.

When I join a group or community, taking my lead from its traditions and values, I call this the religious turn.

When I go to a doctor or psychologist, looking for a correct evaluation and for medical or pseudo-medical treatment, I call this the diagnostic turn.

When I look outwards, seeking to act in society or to build a better world, I call this the political turn.

There is value in all these.

But sooner or later it is borne in upon me that I am part of the problem. I begin to look into my heart. I call this the inward turn.

Now I ask hard questions, “Who am I? What am I like? What in myself am I hiding from?” I try to be truthful with myself about my own feelings. Whatever shares that inward truthfulness, I call “spiritual”.

What is spiritual accompaniment?

In spiritual accompaniment, somebody who is familiar with the landscape of feeling keeps somebody else company, whose feelings are clouded, narrowed or lost, who yearns for deeper understanding, struggles with a moral uncertainty, or trembles on the threshold of an unknown path.

Spiritual accompaniment is about listening with empathy and compassion, while somebody turns inwards to wait upon the wisdom of the heart.

Spiritual accompaniment invites us to shed our stories, and to feel directly what life is like.

Spiritual accompaniment frees us from the grip of false standards, and invites us to value the truly precious things in life.

Spiritual accompaniment is about accepting things as they are, and being at peace with change.

Spiritual accompaniment is profoundly relational. We are in this together. We walk side by side. And that is what is so helpful, that we share the inward turn.

I offer sessions of spiritual accompaniment, either here in Glasgow or over the phone. Please get in touch if you would like to know more.

There is time to rest and time for the inner journey, time to look around, time to renew our sense of meaning, time to go more deeply into the heart.

There is time for meditative communion and meditative listening, time for the spiritual journey and time to offer one another spiritual accompaniment.

There is time to learn from each other, to hear what each one’s experience has been. There is time to touch the central stream of feeling in ourselves and one another.

We may spend a little time with lines of poetry or contemplative literature, with music or art. We may write or paint or practise authentic movement. We may go walking on the hills, in the woods or by the water in the valleys.

Typically, people learn more about empathy and self-empathy in this gentle environment than through any amount of traditional, formal schooling.

And nobody has to take part in anything. You join in as much or as little as you like.

There is time simply to be.

Details of forthcoming retreats are given below. Please get in touch if you would like to know more.

2014 Venue – Glenthorne, Grasmere, English Lake District
2014 Dates – TO BE ANNOUNCED

The house (Glenthorne) is comfortable and welcoming. It is filled with the quietness of Quaker spirituality. The food is good. The setting is beautiful, in the valley of Easedale, a short walk from the pretty village of Grasmere.

Grasmere is a place made famous by the poems of William Wordsworth, who lived here. We may read some of his lines.

Please get in touch with us if you would like to know more about the 2014 Summer Retreat in England.

The retreat will be held in a private house in a quiet, traditional village in the Spanish countryside, during the time of the orange blossom. The weather in Spain is already lovely, while it rains in England.

We will live together as a community, sharing the housework and cooking – it will not be much – and some meals will be made by local cooks.

We will spend some time meditating upon lines of mystical poetry, verses from the Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross.

Please get in touch with us if you would like to know more about the Orange-Blossom-Time Retreat in Spain.

Meditative listening is for you and for the other person. It is always a personal matter, a matter of the spirit.

Meditative listening is designed to be simple. Everything likely to be troublesome has been patiently eliminated from the system. So you might practise year after year and never have occasion to turn to a professional for help.

Yet meditative listening is not only simple. It is refined and intuitive, subtle and single-minded.

So you may want to undergo training after all: to illuminate your inward life, or to deepen your empathy for others, or with a view to practising spiritual accompaniment, or to integrate meditative listening into your professional life, or maybe for all these reasons.

Most training is about learning skills, but this one is more subtle: it is about developing sensitivities. Sensitivity grows over time, through an accumulation of experience. The process can’t be hurried.

Recognising that we live in a world tightly guarded by forms of recognition, I offer various forms of acknowledgment of any training you do.

Each time you come to me for an hour of spiritual accompaniment, it counts as one hour of training in meditative listening.

The Short Retreat counts as thirty-five hours’ training in meditative listening.

The Long Retreat counts as fifty hours’ training in meditative listening.

Participants in a meditative listening retreat receive a Certificate in Meditative Listening and a Certificate of Professional Development.

The Diploma in Meditative Listening will be awarded when you have met all the following requirements:

You have received the Certificate in Meditative Listening.

You have been selected for training in meditative listening.

You have completed two hundred hours of face-to-face training in meditative listening.

You have attended the long retreat at least once (this counts as part of the two hundred hours of training).

You have made audio- or video-recordings of two half-hour sessions in which you are the listener; transcribed them fully; added line-by-line notes; and brought the transcripts and notes to the training group for discussion.

And you feel ready to receive the Diploma.

Please get in touch with The Centre for Meditative Listening if you would like to know more about training.

NOTEI continue to act as a Focusing Co-ordinator for the Focusing Institute, training Certified Focusing Professionals and Focusing Co-ordinators; and I act as a Mentor for the British Focusing Teachers’ Association, training Focusing Practitioners, Teachers and Mentors. Training in meditative listening counts towards these programmes.

Above all, Meditative Listening is idiodynamic. It is founded on the hypothesis that the movements of life in a human being are profoundly individual. Every soul is a unique eco-system.

Not only do people have thoughts and feelings, but in each person the processes of thinking and feeling move forward in their own way.

If we barge in with noise and interference, we will scare all the little animals and birds into hiding. The leaves will wither and the trees will fall. The soil will be blown to the four winds and washed into gullies by the winter rains. And when we have made a desert, perhaps we will call it peace. So we walk quietly and we sit very still.

This idiodynamic principle does not come from psychology or philosophy. It comes from the arts and humanities, from literature and especially from stories. For no story is about a type of person. Every story is about an individual, just this one and no other.

For this reason, Meditative Listening is a “no teaching, no guiding” school.

We do not guide the inner process. Instead, we follow along with sensitive, delicate alacrity. We do not teach this way of being. Instead, we aim to set up conditions in which learning will emerge by itself.

It follows that Meditative Listening is elusive to convey. Yet the living of it is peaceful.

You are here to listen, only to listen. When somebody feels deeply heard, the inner development arises by itself. It does not come from you. So listening is deeply peaceful.

Feeling heard, anybody falls silent. Silent because one thing has been heard. Silent because the next is not yet come. In silence, life moves forward.

What is this moving forward which sounds so mysterious? It is an abandonment of derivative thoughts, conventional emotions and helpless passivity. It is a movement towards independent thought, genuine feeling and free agency.

So this is the immediate lineage of Meditative Listening. It is one way within Focusing and the Person-Centred Approach. It is not the only way.

I teach empathy and self-empathy.
I offer spiritual accompaniment and lead retreats.
I am a musician, a poet and a contemplative.

I live in Glasgow (Scotland) with my wife and family.
I play the piano – mostly Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.
I love to be in wild nature, to walk on the hills or sit by the sea.
As a child I loved canoeing, and used to build drystone walls.

2001-2005
Created Focusing and the Power of Philosophy – five advanced weeklong seminars, with Kye Nelson, Campbell Purton, Barbara McGavin and Rob Parker

2000 - 2004
Reading philosophy under the guidance of Campbell Purton

1994-present
BFTA Focusing Mentor

1994
Co-founded the British Focusing Teachers’ Association

1992
Certifying Co-ordinator (The Focusing Institute)

1989 - 1990
One year course in regression and integration
with Anouk Grave and Mike Eales, leading to the Praxis
Postgraduate Certificate in Regression and Integration

1989
Focusing Trainer (The Focusing Institute)

1988-1992
Studying Focusing at the Focusing Institute in Chicago, with Ann Weiser Cornell and others, and in individual sessions with Gene Gendlin, Mary McGuire and Bebe Simon

1988-1991
Studying the Person-Centred Approach with Senga Blackie

1980-1989
Developing Creative Piano Playing, an approach to music-making through free composition and improvisation at the piano

1974-present
Slowly evolving the meditative listening approach from many sources, partly through wide-ranging artistic, historical, psychological and spiritual explorations, but mainly through the experiences of ordinary life and whilst sitting beside a piano

1974-present
Teaching the piano

1974
BA (Music), Emmanuel College, Cambridge

1974
Final year dissertation on the application of the idiodynamic principle to the understanding of works of music.

1972
Made a commitment to bring the Person-Centred Approach into all aspects of my life, work and relationships